Apocalypto (2006)

 

We aren’t spared much visually in terms of brutality in Apocalypto, a film about indigenous people around the time of the Mayan civilization in Mexico. The movie, directed by Mel Gibson with his usual penchant for highlighting violence and cruelty, includes scenes of people getting their throats cut, a jaguar eating a man’s face off, beheadings, and, perhaps most infamously, a Mayan priest tearing the heart out of the chest of a man and showing it still beating to the assembled blood-thirsty masses. All of this (and more) plays out in full view. The cinematography of Apocalypto is first-rate—the film is beautifully shot overall—but there is a lot of blood and gore splashed across the screen. The film has a rather simple plot. Jaguar Paw and his father and father and friends hunt for a tapir. They joke with each other and enjoy the results of their hunt. When they return home, they lead regular lives. One of his friends is suffering from his mother-in-law’s insistence that he sire some grandchildren for her. Their peace is rather short lived, though. The hunters had already seen a group of refugees in the forest, and it isn’t long into the film before Jaguar Paw’s village is attacked. Many villagers die at the hands of the attackers, and we are witness to most of their deaths, including the throat-cutting of Flint Sky, Jaguar Paw’s father, in front of this son. Any surviving men are taken captive to be used for human sacrifice in the Mayan city. The women who are taken captive are sold as slaves. The surviving children are left behind as if they are worthless to the attackers. Jaguar Paw’s wife Seven and young son Turtles Run hide in a pit, hoping to stay there safely until Jaguar Paw’s return. The journey to the Mayan city is fraught with obstacles, such as the difficulties of being tied to a severely wounded captive who keeps falling down from exhaustion, and their arrival in the Mayan city is quite the visual spectacle. Following the bizarre prophecy of a young girl with what appears to be leprosy—someone the captors and captives encounter on their journey—Jaguar Paw manages to escape being beheaded and de-heartened thanks to a solar eclipse, an alleged sign from the gods. However, he then has to try to escape from his initial captors, who get to use him and his fellow surviving men as target practice—even more ways to die violently. His attempt to escape through the forest becomes a sort of “and then there were none” journey, as one by one, his pursuers meet gruesome ends (see the earlier reference to a jaguar eating a man’s face off…). By the end of the film, only two of the original captors survive, but even they halt in the face of the arrival of the Spanish with their armor and weapons and priests. We should all know what happens next to the Mayans; if you don’t know your history, let’s just say it doesn’t bode well for the indigenous people. The film’s actors reportedly spoke the closest approximation to the original Mayan language, the Yucatec Maya language. The performances are uniformly good, but other than Rudy Youngblood as Jaguar Paw, most of the characters are rather broadly drawn, so it’s difficult to rouse a great deal of empathy, especially when you start to realize that most of these characters won’t last very long on screen. And, to be fair, the names of most characters appear in subtitles only one, if at all, so it’s not even easy to keep track of what they’re called. I suppose that kind of anonymity feeds into one of the movie’s themes, that of the poor who are often sacrificed in the building of a great civilization (even though the film seems to confuse some of the characteristics of Aztec civilization with that of the Mayans). I’m not sure that’s really what resonates with an audience, though. It’s more likely to be the memory of the acts of violence that will linger most and longest.

Oscar Nominations: Best Achievement in Makeup, Best Achievement in Sound Mixing, and Best Achievement in Sound Editing